The 9.10 boot loader progress bar

[John Dong]

On Jan 25, 2010, at 11:48 AM, Joe Zimmerman wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 11:41 AM, John Dong <jdong at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> > It's familiar, and when something stalls it's suddenly not familiar.
> > I don't have to care WHAT it's doing, just as long as it's doing
> > something, and telling me what it's doing.  Apple used to do this in
> > System 7 and System 8 at least by showing icons during boot,
> > signifying what part of the boot process it was currently in.
> There is no "part" of bootup progress anymore. Everything happens together in parallel as long as its dependencies are met, and can be arbitrary order during bootup. IO traffic in an unrelated bootup job can cause a seemingly small other job to "stall".
> 
> It's not at all surprising that non-linear booted OS'es like OS X 10.4+, Ubuntu with Upstart, Windows 2000+, etc do not attempt to show a linear progress bar.
> 
> Why not show a panel of greyed-out icons at the bottom of the screen, one for each major component, and light up each icon as the corresponding component is initialized? This would reflect the correct abstraction (and if the icons had captions, users would have some idea of what was wrong if the boot process stalled).
> 
I agree with you, a lightup panel of Upstart jobs with status indications is a really good bootup visual. I'd like to see this feature implemented. Any volunteers? :)



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